"Id suspect a good redneck backyard bot (made from a riding lawn mower)
would use a homebrew thermal lance made from a rusty piece of pipe
found in the back 40, and Grandmas O2 bottle and turn your bot into
$10,000 worth of smoldering scrap in right short order. Or simply
bludgen it to pieces with the differential from a 62 chevy pickemup
truck."

It would never pass safety inspection.

"Nasa approach...does that mean yur bot will explode as the start
signal is given or someone will screw up a measurement and your bot
will miss the arena and wind up heading out of the solar system on a
course to eternity?"

Yeah.. Good ole' NASA. But I'm not thinking of that NASA.. I'm thinking
of the ones that make that wonderful memory foam materess. I figured
someone would have something to say about NASAs errors in the past..

"Just one quick comment on that. The higher the precision, the quicker
it will jam. The military learned that 50 years ago with weapons."

I think that has to do more with the tolerances. I know there were
quite a bit of guns and weapons that weren't made with the same
precision each time, so none of the parts were ever interchangable..
and the guns jammed and blew up in their hands.. so I don't know if
that really holds true.. I know, for example, when they put the turret
of a tank on its platform, it has to be so percisely aligned that even
a thousandth of an inch will not work out right. Same with all the
calibration and alignment to fire.. but once you get down to it.. pull
trigger and shoot.

I was under the impression that this group dealt with high percision
and CNC type metal working. I guess I will have to try
rec.crafts.watchmaking instead.

"Frankly I was surprized to leard that you'd spent $7,000.00 on a
project that hadnt been tested with at least one "bl;ade"."

We have $7000 in parts.. motors, gearboxes, batteries, controllers. No
materials yet to actually make the chassis or weapon. Hence my presence
here.